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Any seasoned IT worker can remember a time when his knowledge and insight led to a quick, elegant answer to some issue with performance. A few servers timed out or a boot storm led to greater latency and frustration for co-workers, and the team’s resident IT veteran stepped in to resolve the problem quickly. If this sounds like you, you know that your experience is what makes you a valuable part of the company. However, you can also probably recall a time when your first instinct to solve a problem didn’t produce the same quick and easy resolution. Basing answers and actions on assumptions is a dangerous proposition in any field where analysis and problem-solving are parts of the equation. Just because your solution worked in one instance, doesn’t mean that answer always applies, even when the overarching problems in each situation are similar.

Analytics are what help produce the critical empirical evidence that guides IT teams directly to answers. Experience is an important part of enterprise IT, but complex infrastructures demand equally complex analysis to diagnose and solve problems. Rather than assuming you can fix every problem with a hunch or a quick scan of an activity log, let analytics, derived from robust performance data, guide you to the solution.

IT performance issues vary wildly in both their complexity and their resolutions. Moreover, the operations that infrastructures handle aren’t all the same. Part of the reason IT teams need platforms designed to analyze performance is to understand every aspect of the problem area. A solution for a lagging boot up may not be the same for a similar boot issue when the servers handle vastly different operations. No two IT processes are the same, and often neither are the solutions. Furthermore, trying to solve problems without empirical evidence leads to assumptions that result in unnecessary – and costly – upgrades and overprovisioning that no enterprise IT department can afford.

Spending years working in enterprise IT means you’re going to see just about every issue related to IT performance you can imagine. That doesn’t mean you don’t need some help solving problems. No IT department can afford to waste time getting servers and applications to operate smoothly, especially in an era of IT that demands speed above all else. Your experience is valuable, but sometimes you need a bit of evidence to help you solve your problems.

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